Google Analytics Features I'd Like To See #1

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
posts:12928
votes: 198

- In some cases it only seems to be reporting around 60% of the actual traffic. Not sure how or why that is happening, but we host 250 sites here, and have all the actual logfiles and several analyzers running, and we remove all the bots and our own traffic, and it STILL shows as way low in some cases. Examples available upon request.

- How about a general repository for us to share filters? I'm thinking of something along the lines of the way Google offers widgets and gadgets and whatnot for iGoogle and Desktop. I've created some and gone out and found some out there that did things I didn't even realize were possible; why re-invent the wheel?

- I find the breadcrumb navigation somewhat lacking. There's a lot of times where I'm digging down deep to the keyword level, and I want to go back just one step, and I end up back about four levels, or worse yet, where I started.

- Much more help on setting up to track other types of campaigns (MSN and Yahoo PPC, online campaigns, offline campaigns)

- For those of us who are working with clients (as opposed to just our own accounts) it would be really great to be able to set up some kind of a demo account with some demo stats (or have one available) to show to clients. To be honest, they'd rather have me show them the benefits step by step with an account that looks like their traffic and their sample products than sit through your presentation. I can't show one client another's data, and they just don't seem to get how useful and important this information is unless they can see it and click on it and I can explain it in terms of their business.

Senior Member

joined:July 9, 2003
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Thanks very much for starting this thread, netmeg. I look forward to passing along your feedback - along with that of anyone else who cares to weigh in with their gripes/comments/suggestions/feature requests.

Senior Member

joined:June 20, 2006
posts:1916
votes: 15

You've got a REALLY great feature built into GA, but it's hard to discover. The onClick javascript trick (aka functionality) that can be added to links so that clicking them can trigger completion of a defined goal. This is useful in so many circumstances that it makes my mind spin. But it's availability of FAR from obvious, even to regular users. You desperately need to link to it in the goals creations process, as an example, so people can grasp how they can do this. It's functionality works for many marketers, but is especially useful for goal tracking for affiliates where they don't have access to the shopping cart's confirmation page for purchase confirmation tracking. In this case, clicking through from an affiliate site to the merchant can be defined within GA as a goal by tagging any affiliate link the webmaster wants, and that click-thru (presumably to a merchant) can be used as a proxy for a likely purchase, or at least serious interest.

And of course, this isn't just for affiliates! Any site that sends traffic outside of it's domain can use this feature as well. And, when you think about it, it's not just confined to external site hand-offs either - it's logging links to any destination that you want to analyze, whether external or within your own doamin.

So feedback is good job! But do a better job as explaining how a webmaster might configure useful goals within GA.

Senior Member from US

Recently I bumped up against a 50 profile limit to a Google Analytics account.

I think this should either be extended to something like 200 profiles, or done away with entirely, at least for AdWords clients.

I have clients with multiple sites (heck, I have around 74 sites of my own). Because GA only lets us have 4 goals per profile, I often have to create multiple profiles to track additional goals. Add to that, every time I find or write a new filter, I create a new profile for it, because I don't want to mess up the original data. After a while, these start to add up.

Also, the Site Overlay seems to me to be somewhat buggy. It doesn't even come up on some sites. Other sites, it vastly under-reports clicks on some links - particularly links that are very close together, such as a long list of categories on the left. If the links are really close together, or are images, it'll report the same stats for the entire row of images, even if there's a different link for each image.

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joined:July 9, 2003
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Many thanks for all the posts to this thread.

I am making sure that exactly the right folks see your feedback - and will give it an even broader audience within Google by including some of the your posts, verbatim, in the Advertiser Feedback Report later this evening.

Senior Member

joined:June 20, 2006
posts:1916
votes: 15

when you rename a campaign in adwords, the analytics package breaks the data from then on into separate groupings, meaning it recognizes a simple campaign renaming as a break point in the data... i was going to request that this be changed, so that campaign name changes in adwords don't demark a break within GA PPC data...

Junior Member

joined:Oct 9, 2007
posts:79
votes: 0

the ability to track across multiple adwords accounts would be wonderful. Many of our campaigns span more than 1 adwords account and we end up having to put tracking code on the site for every one which is not only sloppy, it also makes consolidation a pain...

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
posts:12928
votes: 198

I can't figure out why some of the traffic/conversions from the Content Network are showing up as referrals from pagead2.googlesyndication.com, and some shows up as google(cpc) from the (content targeting). I can't find anything in any docs about why this would be, and why it's only on some accounts and not others.

There's also the issue of the dreaded (not set). We need some troubleshooting docs on why this shows up, when it's to be expected, and when it can be fixed.

Right now it's recommended to use auto-tagging in an AdWords campaign, or else turn it off and use custom urls. It shouldn't be either / or - we should be able to specify auto-tagging, but then be able to override with a custom url if we need to.

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
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votes: 198

Realizing that Google probably doesn't want to acknowledge or support the existence of payment systems other than Google Checkout, my clients who offer Paypal (which is pretty much all of them - either exclusively or in addition to other payment methods) are desperate to have some easier way to track Paypal transactions in GA. There are hacks out there on the net that are terribly unwieldy and difficult to implement (granted, Paypal's API documentation doesn't help much) Right now, large chunks of ecommerce business are going untracked. Clients not happy at the idea of having to hire a separate developer, or just forgetting about tracking that part of their business. Not being able to easily track ecommerce that goes offsite to complete the transaction and then returns to the site is a HUGE drawback.

Junior Member

joined:Oct 9, 2007
posts:79
votes: 0

can i have your colleague's email address :)

we have so many issue linking (and unlinking) existing adwords and analytics accounts. it's easy enough when you start from scratch, but many of our clients have one or the other already and want us to take them over and we end up having to try and link them to our accounts.

a nice step by step guide on how to do that would help (including tips on how to prevent/correct common issues)

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
posts:12928
votes: 198

The dreaded (not set) could use some more attention in the help docs. I only just recently figured out that it's okay when it's there for organic traffic, but that something's wrong when it's there for cpc (namely AdWords) traffic.

Senior Member

I'd really like to see the export functions actually export all of the data from the report being viewed (not just the data range that's on screen at the time).

If you have a report that has 50,000 rows in it, you've have to be mad to sit and do 100 exports.

The old interface worked fine for this. I hope it's just me not doing it right (I'd be happy to stand corrected as long as we get the ability to invoke that functionality again), if it is broken I'm sure we're not the only ones it annoys.

Junior Member

joined:Aug 18, 2006
posts:103
votes: 0

Recently Google added native unicode support for IDN Domains in the Webmaster tools.

1. Can IDN Domain compatibility (showing in native script) be added to Analytics too? 2. There is a well known bug between us site developers that use IDN Domains. IE7 does not show in the Stats if it's an IDN Domain. All of my sites are Japanese & IE7 shows up even at minimum percentages in the ones with non IDN domains but even sites with constant traffic of 100 to 200 uniques a day, IE7 doesn't show in the stats. Everything is lumped into IE6 for some reason.

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
posts:12928
votes: 198

For the Dashboard, I'd like to be able to specify whether or not to use a graph or a table for any set of stats, when both are available. In some cases (I think Traffic was the one I tried) I wanted the table, but it kept adding the graph.

Junior Member

joined:Aug 15, 2005
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Can you allow goals to be easily copied to different profiles like filters. I use multiple profiles for the same website, the goals are the same. Every time I modify a goal I have to change the goal settings across multiple profiles which quickly becomes a pain.

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
posts:12928
votes: 198

Yea, and that reminds me of another thing. I have a lot of accounts linked into mine, both for myself and my clients. I can apply filters across multiple profiles in a single account, but it would *really* help to be able to apply filters across multiple accounts that I'm linked to. For example, there are probably 60 client accounts that I've set up for my clients, and I have all them linked into MY account (as administrator) and I need to be able to filter out all of our traffic (3 IPs from my company, plus my IP at home, and a couple of domain names) from each of these accounts, and right now, it takes forever.

Likewise, I have an ecommerce filter that associates transaction numbers with the specific source and keyword that that particular transaction came in on. The variables don't change - it's the same filter for everyone, so I'd like to be able to define it once, and then apply it to every one of my ecommerce clients.

It sure would be nice to have a set of filters that I could set up *once* and then apply to multiple accounts as needed.

Junior Member

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
posts:12928
votes: 198

Mine was based on this one that I found on the web; I modified mine a little to suit my particular needs, but you can find the essential information below. If the mods feel the need to remove the link, then I'll send it to you privately, but I think this is a pretty useful one (and I'm still waiting for Google to set up that filter resource area, hint hint hint)

Senior Member from US

joined:Mar 30, 2005
posts:12928
votes: 198

Opps, well, I'll post these for next time. These two come from my partner who sits next to me:

1) On the line graph that displays visits over the past 30 days, with dots representing the individual date - he would like to request that if you click on a dot, the date range automatically jumps to showing just that date. So if I mouse over November 9, and click on it, I get the date range change to be just November 9.

2) He's having trouble accessing GA with IE7. It works fine in Firefox, but for him, at work and at home, he gets an error message:

when logging in and accessing the dashboard. The weird thing is, I'm running IE7, and the same add-ins, and I don't have any problem. But we searched this error in Google, and found a lot of people complaining about it. Maybe it's related to the flash? Don't know, but it's very aggravating. Even started happening on a brand new Vista install last week. And it's not just his account, he tried it on client accounts as well.